In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Dr. Ido Cohen, a clinical psychologist specializing in Jungian and relational depth psychology. He is the founder of The Integration Circle, focusing on psychedelic integration, shadow work, and turning peak experiences into lasting transformation.
• 00:56 Early experiences in India and discovery of integration
• 03:08 Why integration is hard & cultural context
• 09:00 The illusion of quick transformation
• 12:18 Balancing work, business, and integration
• 14:40 Integration for busy modern lives
• 19:35 Why self-care feels like work
• 22:12 Ceremony continues after the ceremony
• 25:07 Archetypal & transpersonal dimensions
• 29:42 Common archetypes and possessions
• 34:52 Soul, religion & invisible forces
• 48:02 What is the shadow and shadow work
• 52:20 Shadow encounter vs. shadow work
• 56:32 Turning darkness into growth
If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats go to http://www.lawayra.com
Find more about Dr. Ido Cohen at theintegrationcircle.com or on Instagram at @theintegrationcircle
Transcript
Sam Believ: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com.
Dr. Ido Cohen: For me, the archetypal in the shamanic are what they call visions and what we call archetypes, where they call entities and we call archetypes are basically the same. They’re just different words to describe it. Most people have a very intellectual relationship with the idea of archetypes.
It’s like a symbol that just lives there, as opposed to what Yung actually meant is that archetypes are living entities. They’re living energies that impact us, that can possess us, that can teach us. For me, the idea is when we have experiences, and I think ayahuasca can be, is one of the most powerful.
Openers to the archetypal first, just to note what happened to me when I was having the experience. Did I contract? Did I expand? Did I feel fear? So really, I want just people to tell me what was their experience and not to jump to meaning making. I don’t know if people have that in your retreat, but people love having, they love it when they have visions of jaguars and owls and, all kinds of familiar mythological images.
It’s less fun when the visions or the archetypes are more dark or more challenging, or or the ness of your mother or the harshness of your father or stuff like that. So the idea for me is how do I. Stay in the experience without moving too fast to interpreting it and intellectualizing it.
Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast. As always with you, the whole assembly of today. I’m having a conversation with Ido Cohen. Dr. Ido Cohen is a clinical psychologist specializing in Jung and relational depth psychology with the focus on psychedelic integration. He’s the founder of the integration circle and has worked extensively with ayahuasca trauma and shadow work.
His research explores how to turn peak experiences into a long lasting transformation. This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca Retreat. At Lara, we combine affordability. Accessibility and authenticity. Laira, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you, IDO, welcome to the show.
Dr. Ido Cohen: Thank you, Sam.
Thank you for having me.
Sam Believ: So I was planning to interview Ido already, and then we were at Maps and I met him there. So it’s cool to meet you in person. Yeah. Ido, let’s start by maybe share your story and how did you choose this line of work? How did you end up working with psychedelics?
Dr. Ido Cohen: It’s a good question.
First really, I’m glad to be here and I’ve listened to your podcast and I know people you interviewed, so I’m glad to be a guest here. Two answers. One is, a long time ago I was traveling in India and had a bunch of really profound experiences with psychedelics and without, and I traveled with other people.
And when I came back I was really fascinated with seeing how we were readjusting to our old environments and seeing the challenges and difficulties and seeing people having, really having peak experiences and coming back. And after three months, it’s like nothing happened. And it just really fascinated me.
I was like, I couldn’t make sense of why some, when, how can anyone who experienced something so personally profound can forget about it or let it go? So I really wanted to study the idea of change. And fast forward 10 years, I had my first Ayahuasca experiences and it was time for me to choose my research study.
And I was like. I, it was clear to me, and I think in a way the plants helped that I was, I wanted to study integration. I was like, I want to understand how we take profound psychospiritual experiences and turn them into embodied change that can, that is sustainable and carries over time. And that’s when it started doing my research in 2011 until 2017, was fortunate enough to get a grant and go to Peru and do part of the research there at and talk to interview people and have my own, more of my own experiences.
And that’s was the beginning of everything. That’s birth, the integration circle, births a big part of my psychotherapy practice. So that would be the short answer.
Sam Believ: And what did you find in your research? What is it why is it so hard for people to. Get their lessons and integrate them.
Yeah,
Dr. Ido Cohen: there’s so many layers, right? There is a very cultural layer, which is we are, most of us live in a very secular culture that’s devoid of depth and spirituality and soul, and doesn’t prioritize taking time to process, analyze, embody, integrate any experience, let alone peaks, psychedelic experiences or peak experiences per period.
So first of all, we’re dealing with a cultural complex, right? When you have these experiences, the first thing is how do I bring all this newness into a com, a culture that doesn’t really support it, right? We always talk about it in the Ayahuasca community, how that’s one of the big differences between living in the jungle or living in indigenous tribes, where everybody has done it and it’s so weaved into the fabric of the village versus living in the modern west where it’s slowly getting more and more integrated.
But still, as a culture, we don’t have that relationship with the sacred and the newness. So that’s one too. It’s, that breeds our personal struggle with capitalism. We want things fast, we want things immediate, and we don’t wanna, and if possible is with as little work as possible. And when I interviewed people, all the people that I’ve interviewed, 92% of them said that when they had their experience and they came back, two things were very clear to them.
One is that in order to really stay in relationship with their experience, they have to prioritize it. So they had to start pushing other things away and saying no, this is my priority right now. I’m gonna focus on my experience, what happened to me, the how the experience is expanding, the feelings, the sensations, the images that came with it, and really build a relationship.
And I think that’s the key word for me is relationship. Relationship. So yeah, prioritizing that and, with the sacrifices that’s come with it. Family members not taking it well, friends not taking it well, wanting all of a sudden really shifting how you’re interacting with people, what your hobbies are, where you wanna spend your time, and how you’re managing yourself.
Most of us have all kinds of, let’s call them leisure practices. And I think integration sometimes calls for it to change. So no more binging of Netflix, it’s actually, I’m gonna go into the forest and sit with my experience. Or instead of distracting myself with friends in a bar, I’m gonna go and sit and meditate and journal or whatever it is that I need to do as part of building that relationship.
And then there’s obviously all the integration practices and how people engage with it. Really seeing the necessity of having a, psycho symbolic framework to work with these things and the ability to work with intense emotions, I think was, those were very two very big things. Integration brings a lot of opening and opening brings by necessity, a lot of emotions and a lot of sensations.
And it’s one thing to be in the two week, two to four week sparkle period after experiences where everything is better and lighter and clearer, and there’s deep insight versus when the deeper emotions kick in, which is the sadness and the grief, and the pain and the memories or the transcendence, and being asked to make big changes in my life or to start doing things that I’ve never done before.
It all brings all kinds of confrontations with the old version of us. So a lot of it is also dialogue between who I was before the experience and who I am now. How do you take new information and put it in an old model? So that’s, I think that’s the main, I call it the initial gates of integration.
That there’s the immediate, like the first three, four days and then there is the first four weeks. And if you can put really supportive structures, either with support or yourself through other people with yourself, then you can really get access to the integration. But most people, I think the integration falls apart within the four weeks.
It just becomes another experience.
Sam Believ: Yeah. Integration is this thing that everyone talks about. There’s so many different ways of explaining it and but it’s just so hard. And I think the problem is that integration is just not sexy. It’s not this IAS experience is this, wow. It’s this, even though it’s hard, the people, it’s it’s interesting, it’s adventurous and integration is eh, it’s it’s some really bland food that’s healthy for you, but nobody wants to eat it.
And but it’s like you need it. And what I find is people who need it the most also are least able to do it. And people who are able to do it don’t need it, which kind of makes sense because if you’re a meditator, then it’s, you don’t really need that much healing because you are already like, healing yourself.
So it’s so what can we do about it? Like somebody comes here. Yeah. I
Dr. Ido Cohen: think it’s interesting what you’re saying. I always my analogy is that, the difference between the experience and integration is experience is like having a really hot one. A very steamy one.
Nighter with someone. Integration is like having actual intimate relationship. ’cause it takes a lot of work, a lot of investment, a lot of showing up over and over again. But I don’t know, I met a lot of meditators that are that are actually not good integrators. That they meditate out of their integration.
And I’ve seen them come to my communities ayahuasca circles for years and they come back with the same issues and ’cause they, what they do is they meditate on it, but actually the integration is no. Get off your pillow and go have uncomfortable conversations. Go try this other new thing.
Move your body in a different way. Maybe get out of your mind and come into your, your heart or your body. So I think it really integration really.
Integration is really a taking in a different lifestyle. I’m curious what you think, Sam, but I believe that when you go work with plants, the opening of our personal unconscious opening to the world of the plants, to the shamanic space, that it, they come with, those experiences come with their own requirements.
They want things from us afterwards. I’ve had experiences of having, seeing what I perceived was the plans telling me, you should really stop eating in that place. ’cause the food there is really dirty. And I was like but I really like that place. So we’re like, from the smallest of things to, oh wow.
Who I thought I was is actually based around a trauma story or what my parents told me, or what the culture told me. And now I have to start. And this is something we don’t talk a lot about. And I’m curious, what do you think? There’s a lot of disintegration that happens before integration happens.
Sam Believ: First of all, I have to be honest, I’m bad at integration myself.
Like I’m just not I run this extremely busy ayahuasca retreat, which recently we calculated, we have 49 people working for us and we host three retreats every month. And on average, 70 to 90 people come. And I drink medicine once a month and it really helps me and I always learn something new.
But integration, I believe requires time and I don’t have any. So I’m just it. Definitely ICA still helps me even without integration, I think. So there’s 50 shades of integration because you cannot have zero integration to have zero integration. You still have some.
So what we’re trying to describe is like how to get the optimal integration. But for me, the optimal integration would be first of all. Switching off my phone for a week, but I can, if I do that, my, my business collapses. So
Dr. Ido Cohen: unless you let someone else take over, take the business for a
Sam Believ: week. Yes. I’m working on that.
I’m actually in the process of hiring a general manager, but
Dr. Ido Cohen: so I integrate. But this is where it gets interesting, right? When integration starts asking, that’s what I mean by has demands, right? So you can tell me. Yeah. I think integrate really, the next good step for integration for me is I need a week off, but I can’t, right?
And then it’s but dot. And I would say wait, but what if That’s the integration. The integration is to do the hard thing, to open up, to trust someone to make, give them responsibility to, that, that sometimes integration looks like that. It looks like a business decision. That’s why I think it’s such a beautiful art and science, the idea of integration.
Sam Believ: And it’s definitely a guilty thing for me because, you, you can, if you are watching a video on. Whatever it is for you. Like right side of my face, there’s an integration journal that I wrote through people, which we give to people when they come to the retreat. So they journal, but I hardly journal maybe twice a month, and I’d like to do it more, but it’s just not possible.
And then I tell them everything, from all the instructions. And I’ve interviewed 10 people talking about integration all amazingly, and I know everything there’s to know about it. But yeah the other thing is actually doing it. So let’s talk about that. Let’s be realistic. Same as me.
I’m busy with my business. Other people also, they come back home. They have to go back to the, to their job because unfortunately they can’t take a few months off and they have to make money. And then there’s like extremely addictive devices that we have to use for work. But then you get dragged into doom scrolling and stuff like that. I actually let me not sponsored, but there’s this app, it’s called Stop Scroll that I got five days ago. Amazing. It just doesn’t let you see any short format video. ’cause I can resist long format content, still have enough like willpower, but the sport forward stuff, it’s it’s like cocaine for your dopamine brain.
So how do people that they just had powerful ias experience, transformative. They’ve learned so much, now they’re going back, but they still have to have a job. They still have a family. How can they integrate? You talk about integration requiring time and patience, but they don’t have that much time.
What, what can we do? Because I also need to know.
Dr. Ido Cohen: I think I totally agree with you. We can’t I’ve seen many people blow up their life to integrate experiences, and I don’t know if that’s, it’s rarely necessary. There is real world responsibilities, like you said. We have jobs, we have partnerships, we have kids businesses and those are real.
We can’t just drop off everything. And within that, I truly believe in that cliche that it’s not that you don’t have time, it just, you’re not prioritizing. And that’s where the conflict begins, right? Old versus new. If I go to do an ayahuasca retreat with you, Sam and I come back and I’m like, I see that I have a phone addiction as a way to regulate my feelings or dopamine seeking.
And it would really benefit me if I. Cut it in half and instead read a book or spend more time with my partner, or, that’s my integration. That’s my responsibility. So the idea is to do what I call the next first step, which is okay, that’s the goal. The goal is to cut your screen time from six hours a day to three hours a day, let’s say.
We are not cutting it all together because that’s, usually, those goals fail. I’m like, great. What’s the next first step? Do you download an app? There is a thing called Cube that takes all your social media apps and locks them in your phone and will not give you access for more than at prescribed amount of time a day, right?
There’s all these things that you can do. So it’s okay, what’s the next first step? You so lock your apps, right? Download something and you decide that’s it. I’m committing, I’m locking the apps for, I can only do two hours a day, but now that’s just the first step. Usually what’s hard for people? Once you change the habit, all kinds of things happen internally.
’cause you open up space. So all of a sudden I’m nervous and I can’t distract myself with my phone or I have five minutes, like I have 10 minutes between clients and instead of doing my usual phone check, I’m just sitting with myself. That’s the more interesting part for me, right? The changing of behavior is one thing, but it’s like what happens when the behavior change?
That’s where the transformation is. It’s oh wow. Now that I have all this time, I’m noticing that I carry a lot of anxiety and a lot of tension in my body and it’s sometimes not easy for me to relax. Or when I don’t distract myself, I and I talk to my partner. All of a sudden I feel more vulnerable or all kinds of things.
I think for me, that’s where the work, the deeper. Closer to the core work happens in integration, that then gives us the behavioral change. ’cause when I do that, my psyche, my system and the connection between my psyche and the plants will start giving me the insight as far as what’s the behavioral change.
’cause then I’m like, oh wow. You know what? I cut three hours of face of screen time and I see that if I meditate for 20 minutes or go to the gym or take a walk or sit outside and look, stare at my plants, I feel better. That’s the practice. But it only can come through noticing what happens when I change the behavior, when I take away the habit.
So I really believe yes, and within the, within the constrictions and responsibilities of our life, we can all open up and I’ve worked with. Really almost every demographic I worked with very busy CEOs to people who are, nine to fivers, to people who are off the grid. Everybody deals with this issue of prioritization and everybody finds time some more, some less.
Sam Believ: No, I agree. There’s, you can always make time. That’s for sure. If you really prioritize it. But then it’s of course if it feels like it’s work and you’ve already feel like you’re worked enough and you wanna rest then it’s also hard. Why is it so hard for modern humans too?
Dr. Ido Cohen: You said something interesting, if you don’t mind me.
You said if it feels like work, i’m curious, what, why do you think that people feel that taking care of themself, loving themself, investing in their own wellbeing, which is. Basically the only thing we actually have feels like a burden, right? It’s work
Sam Believ: because it’s hard.
Dr. Ido Cohen: Yeah. But also going to work every day for 50 years is hard.
But what’s hard? What’s hard about it? Why is that so hard that we’re like, oh, I don’t know if I want to do that.
Sam Believ: So for me personally, I’m like a dopamine addict. I get bored, just sitting by myself. Like I get bored. Like one of the only ways that I can do it is if I smoke a cigar. And even then sometimes I get this amazing thoughts and I want to use my phone to save it or do something, and then I get dragged
Dr. Ido Cohen: into the hole.
Sam Believ: Yeah.
Dr. Ido Cohen: But what happens when you smoke a cigarette? Why? That allows you to take care to relax and
Sam Believ: slow down and. No, because I guess it’s it’s a time where I, specifically I kinda there’s this contract that I have with myself that this is my time to rest and relax and Yeah.
And if I have a cigar, it’s it’s easier, I don’t know, maybe something in the tobacco, a plant spirit, there is a ceremony around it.
Dr. Ido Cohen: Absolutely. There is a ceremony, you take it, you cut it. I don’t know how you do it, right? Where you take it, you cut it, you sit probably in the,
Sam Believ: I stand in tension, I smell it, I light it.
Dr. Ido Cohen: So that’s, I think that’s already a big, actually one of the things that helps people with integration that I encourage people to do is get out of automatic and bring intentionality to what you’re doing. I always tell people. It doesn’t matter what integration practice you do, what matters is how you enter it.
Because you can do all the things, you can journal and do the thing, but you’re just doing it on automatic. It’s not gonna give you much. But if I’m doing it with intention of I am gonna sit down and connect with the plants, connect with my experience, and from that place I’m gonna smoke that cigar or write or go talk to my friend, it’s gonna look very different.
And there is something about that, that me and my colleague, we talk, you cont the ceremony continues. The ceremony doesn’t end because you’re, you are staying connected to wanting to be that level of consciousness and on that level of intentionality. So you asked why you, why I think it’s hard for people to do it.
I think that these practices really connect us with two things we are very disconnected from, and not by fault by, because of how most of us are raised, we’re disconnected from our soul and the depth of our psyche, which is our psychological, emotional, somatic self. And we’re disconnected from the, let’s call it the archetypal, transpersonal, shamanic worlds.
And those, these plants open us up to reconnect with both of these worlds. And that can be incredibly overwhelming. Even if it’s blissful. It can be incredibly overwhelming. It can be odd, it can be, like you said, it can be really hard. We start remembering things we don’t remember, we start understanding things about how ourselves and why our lives looks, look the way they look and it doesn’t feel good.
Or we encounter truths about what happens in the world, or collective pain or grief or transcendent states that are just all foreign for us. So the first thing is right. What’s hard about it is how do I stay? And the key word is relationship. How do I build relationship with this thing? How do I keep staying engaged with it?
And when that feels like a foreign experience to me, or foreign language, the instinct usually for most of us is to do this, is to push away or we minimize it. Or my favorite one that I think most of us do is we start bargaining. We start negotiating. Oh it wasn’t exactly this or it wasn’t as profound or I don’t really think I met the spirit of the plant or the spirit of the river, or I don’t know if that memory I had about my childhood was exactly right because I was, on psychedelics we start negotiating and when you negotiate with something, you water it down.
You start creating this belief, you start creating this trust and then it’s harder to relate to it. It’s harder to work with it. It’s harder to be with it. ’cause you’re then, you’re in a conflict. You’re can, you’re creating a conflict as opposed to, what I encourage people is, what if you don’t negotiate?
We’re not saying it’s the absolute truth, but we’re not doubting it. Your way to figure it out is through engagement, conscious engagement, exploration. Then that will tell you what feels more true, what feels less true, what’s more relevant to me, what’s less relevant, what I can, like you said, realistically take on and what I can’t.
But engagement and relationship is the thing to do.
Sam Believ: Cool. Let’s talk about one of those things that you just mentioned. Archetypal, transpersonal. Tell us more about it and what is it, how do you connect with it and what to do with it if people have those kinds of psychedelic experiences?
Dr. Ido Cohen: A lot for me, a lot of it comes because I’m influenced by Young’s work. I was trained at a young institute and the idea is that for me, the archetypal in the Shamanic are, what they call visions and what we call archetypes, what they call entities, and we call archetypes are basically the same.
They’re just different words to describe it. Most people have a very intellectual relationship with the idea of archetypes. It’s like a symbol that just lives there, as opposed to what you actually meant is that archetypes are living entities. They’re living energies that impact us, that can possess us, that can teach us.
So for me, the idea is when we have experiences, and I think ayahuasca can be, is one of the most powerful openers to the archetypal is first just to note what happened to me when I was having the experience. Did I contract, did I expand? Did I feel fear? Did I feel some kind of, so really I want just people to tell me what was their experience and then.
And not to jump to meaning making. I don’t know if people have that in your retreats, but people love having, they love it when they have visions of jaguars and owls and, all kinds of familiar mythological images. It’s less fun when the visions or the archetypes are more dark or more challenging, or you see your, the ness of your mother or the harshness of your father or stuff like that.
So the idea for me is how do I stay in the experience without moving too fast to interpreting it and intellectualizing it? I wanna stay with the feelings. I wanna stay with the sensations, and I wanna stay with the interaction. So what happened? Did I hear something? Maybe it wasn’t verbal, but I was standing next to this big luminous tree and I felt an incredible sense of peace.
I felt a connection to the earth. Okay, that’s the information I want to work with. So that would be the first step is really staying with these things and getting curious, like, why did I feel relaxed when I was, lemme see if I can find
something yeah. I remember for myself, I’ll tell, I had one ayahuasca ceremony where I was sitting and the person who was leading it had a lot of Buddhist influence and all of a sudden I saw this in my field of vision, this great big black Buddha and with flames all around it. And my response was contraction.
I felt here and I heard this voice say, did you notice what had just happened to you? Like, why are you afraid? And it opened this whole process for me around really staying with that question in the moment. Being like, wait, why am I afraid? And ended up being this profound lesson for me about my own relationship with the feminine.
’cause the image then the vision was like, I am a feminine Buddha. Like, why are you so scared? This is just my look. This is not my essence. And I had to go into this very deep inquiry of oh, why do I, why did I respond that way? Why did I contract? Why is it about this fierce version of a feminine that made me feel fear?
And I worked with it for a long time afterwards and in a way still working with it. So for me, really the idea is how do you get very curious. Stay very present with the feelings and the sensations and how they unfold when you explore them, and eventually some insights, some lesson that’s more tangible will come up and then.
There is what we, I call there is integration and then there’s implementation. Then maybe there is something to implement.
Sam Believ: This episode is sponsored by Lara Ioas Retreat. Most of Lara, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, some of you might have already been to Lara before. For those who don’t know us yet, we started Lara with my wife four years ago.
At Lara, we combine authenticity, accessibility, and affordability. Lara is currently highest rated Iowas retreat in South America with more than 635 star reviews and an average rating of five stars. If you come to Lara, you’ll experience powerful, authentic ceremonies led by our indigenous shaman, Fernando Na.
Very beautiful venue. Just one hour south of Meine Columbia. We’re surrounded by nature and have comforts like hot water wifi at Lura. Our team has guided more than 2000 people through this life-changing transformation of Ayahuasca experience. At the same time, we keep it very affordable. At the moment, we have retreats starting at as low as $645.
So whether you’re coming for healing, clarity, or a deeper connection to yourself, the wire is the best choice. If it is your first time drinking Ayahuasca, you’ll love our three and a half hour preparation course and integration support. All of that is included in price as well as pick up from Metagene accommodation in Ayahuasca.
There are no hidden fees. Visit lara.com to book your retreat or learn more. Lara Connect, heal Grow L-A-W-A-Y-R a.com. Thank you for sharing that experience. And so you say archetypes. Jung philosophy is like same as entities and more shaman approach. So what are archetypes? What are the common ones?
Tell us more about that.
Dr. Ido Cohen: Yeah. There’s a book called Jung Shamanism by an guy called Michael Smith, who he wrote this a long time ago, and he was one of the first pioneers to bridge those worlds. One of the ways in which Y Shamanism cross is that Yung talked about being possessed. He said archetypes will possess you.
So when they really descend on us, and if we don’t have the awareness, the practices, the consciousness, right? That’s when I become a child. I’m not experiencing my child. I’m become a child, or I become their rageful parent, or I become the, the person who goes to one Ayahuasca retreat and thinks they, become their world renowned healer, and now they have to go spread the gospel, which we can talk about a possession of the healer of the shaman architect.
So that’s I think one way in which they really, yeah, they, those worlds mirror each other. But let me, what’s the, say the question again Sam.
Sam Believ: Yeah, what, you say archetypes is the same as entities, so Uhhuh,
Dr. Ido Cohen: yeah. The common ones are there, there is like the personal, psychological, the inner child, the inner critic, the father, the mother culture, the lover, the magician, right?
There’s all these things, the shadow, let’s just start. That’s a huge one. The psychedelic world. Everybody talks about shadow work. Shadow work. Shadow is an archetype. That’s one version of an archetype. And then we move to what we can say there is transpersonal archetypes, which is animals, gods goddesses, deities gods soul, right?
Those, and we move between those worlds. We can experience also their connection, right? I worked with someone who had pretty severe sexual trauma and was raised in a religious background where God was only a punishing God. And then this person went and had a genic experience and she met the most benevolent, loving God and she didn’t know what to do with that.
’cause Her own experience of herself was that she’s bad. She’s damaged because she was, had sexual trauma, that God only punishes people like her, and then meeting this benevolent God who continuously for hours. Showered her with love and praises and reassurance and very positive reinforcement. And she came out of it.
She’s I don’t know what to do with this God. She literally said that, I don’t know what to do with this. God, it doesn’t fit inside this. And our work was to build a relationship with that God and see ’cause that relationship with the God meant that she had to deal with her own self-hatred with her own right.
Her, how she was wrapped around shame and really identified with shame, how she treated her body, how she, her relationship with food. It opened up every dimension of her life. And that’s because she had this very profound experience with what we would call a transpersonal archetype with God. And I think they are the same, or I would say the same as.
I understand shamanic entities to be, because they are an entity, right? The plants have an intelligence. I think that’s across ayahuasca traditions. All plants have intelligences. All of a sudden the animals, when you’re under in that world, animals talk. They teach you the land you can hear. I remember being in Peru and hearing the jungle breathe in my first ayahuasca experience, and it was incredibly beautiful and overwhelming.
And I was like, oh, wow. I can hear the breath of this thing and how big and profound. And from what I’m curious the tradition you come from and how you work with this. And from what I understand, they have at least in the shabel lineage, which is what I’m connected to, they relate to those entities the same way you talk to them.
You give them your time. You do ritual, you honor them and you listen and you see what you can learn from them. And that’s exactly the same thing as working with archetypes, either in dreams or in psychedelic experiences.
Sam Believ: Yeah, I think it’s it’s the same in all traditions that are connected to the nature.
They’re very clearly understand that everything has a spirit. You, you say token of spirit, soul, you say that we need to bring soul back into the world and that we are affected by invisible, but it’s not some mainstream. Can you talk about that?
Dr. Ido Cohen: Yeah. One of my favorite quotes is from James Hillman, who’s the father of archetypal psychology, and he says we, our life is our lives are shaped by invisible forces more than we care to admit.
I truly believe that I think we, humanity is we need, we needed to create this idea that we are in control. ’cause if not, we had to confront the fact that we’re not, and there are other forces that are at play here, and we have to be aware of them and accept that we are not the masters of the universe and we can’t dominate aggressively everything and anything in order to feel that way.
Yeah. And that’s one of the big insights to, to start with is,
and I think the soul got relegated to that. I don’t know what you think, Sam, I’m curious, but I believe it’s hard to really benefit fully from psychedelics if there is big religious trauma. Anything that has, oftentimes psychedelics and plants can take us into the religious world, which is again, God being, Christ consciousness or whatever religion you’re from.
And the moment there is a deep religious wound there, we tend to push, there’s I don’t want to do, I don’t wanna, I don’t want this. ’cause it’s activating. And because we live, again, live in such a modernized, mechanical secular culture, which again, is not all bad, but we have slowly surgically removed soul and the idea of soulfulness from our day-to-day life.
So we have the combination of, oh, soul belongs to religion. Religion is bad. I don’t want to deal with that. And we live in a secular culture. We don’t talk about. Soul. We barely, most of us are barely honest. When people ask us how we are, let alone knew the so to talk, to bring back the idea that, oh wait, we can create soul, we can create, is threatening.
I think to really drop with someone in a way of creating connection that allows for your soul to start being felt is very vulnerable. And vulnerability is very scary and intimacy is very scary. And at the same time, there’s such a profound renewal of interest in psychedelics and plans. Psychedelics is mind manifesting.
It’s already hinting to something deeper and entheogenic is having God dwell inside of you. But we divorced the plants from their how we categorize them. And I think it really without. Recreating an integrative approach to our psychedelic and antigenic experiences. We’re missing out on the domain of soul.
So we’re stuck in psychological, physiological, emotional, and we’re not really giving ourself the benefit of, no, there is something spiritual here. I will define my spirituality. You don’t want to call it soul. Great. Call it whatever you want to call it. Authentic self fire yourself divine self, whatever.
But can I think we, you, and I’m gonna put you in this because we are people who are trying to have a voice and have a voice in this movement, I think we need to normalize that to really reclaim the fact that, yeah, these practices bring you back to soul and not keep doing what the legalization process is asking us, which is no.
Stay scientific. Makes sense. Stay scientific, stay medical. It’s no, why would we do that? We already know that’s part of this. I’m curious what you think though about this, about, yeah.
Sam Believ: Legalization process, gladly, we’re not part of it because we, it’s already legal here and the way it’s legal, the way I ask is legal here in Columbia is as long as you have an indigenous shaman, not necessarily indigenous, but he has to have a permit from indigenous counsel and those are not easily received.
So there’s some kind of control still, but it is legal, so that’s not my fight. But yeah it’s just stupid, like saying, let’s do it scientifically. And you hear, here’s your compound and you sit, you have two therapists sitting next to you and you have a blindfold. It’s like trying to create a container, which obviously makes no sense and is missing a lot of parts, like this shamanic aspect of it.
Instead of just being like, oh, and by the way, this already exists and have existed for thousands of years. Let’s just go get ideas from it. It’s let’s say China created a gown powder and they’re already like sending rocketts to the moon. And then all of a sudden, and the parallel universe we discovered we discovered China only now.
And we’re like, okay, and let’s create our own version of the grandpapa. There’s if it exists, like just go and use it. So regarding religious trauma I never had religious trauma really but I always have had a negative view on religion and rightfully if you really look at religion, it’s just wars and pedophilia and all kinds of weirdness.
So it’s it doesn’t really seem to have much connection to spirit or to the soul. At least. I’ve never been exposed to any. Anything religious that was beneficial? I’m not saying some people have, I’m sure there are good players in that field as well, but I personally grew up thinking that I was not that I was completely irreligious, but I was agnostic.
That’s how I called it. I yeah, maybe something exists, but I don’t know what, but whatever is out there, religions, I think it’s all garbage. That’s what I used to think. Now I, I’ll on going back to the point to like psychedelics and lack of soul, I think it’s impossible to work with psychedelics and not become a believer in something.
It’s just it’s a question of when, not if if you drink ayahuasca, I give you maximum 20 ceremonies before you’re like, oh my God, that exists. And most likely just one will be enough. And and then the que and then you start to understand and then you start interacting with religious entities from different religions.
You’re like, how is that even possible? If not, just if you interact with them. And some of them I’ve interacted with Gods that didn’t even know exists. And then I Googled them and I was like, whoa, this is reals. And that’s transpersonal stuff where it’s like, if somebody believed something into reality now it is there even when after they, they dead, but basically yeah, you, you then become spiritual. Then you realize like even Christian stuff, like I hung out with an archangel one. I was like, what the hell is that? I’m not even religious. And so then you started realizing that in the core of every religion there was something really profound.
But.
Dr. Ido Cohen: How do you understand the fact that you encountered all these other religious entities?
Sam Believ: How do I understand? How do I understand it?
Dr. Ido Cohen: Like you said, it’s something from a different foreign world, right? So why would you connect with them?
Sam Believ: It was always in the ceremony and I see them, I see them and they talk to me, and then I’m like, who are you?
And and that’s how you know, of course you can say you make it up and it’s still possible. I’m not saying that I haven’t, but I’ve had experiences where I saw an entity and they would talk to me about a certain topic and then I’ll look it up and it says that’s what the entity was used for.
Let’s say, oh, this is the God they used to. For protection against such and such, and this is what my experience was. So I was like, okay, then if it’s real then, but I’m basically very confused. I’ll be honest. I’m very confused. I’m, I have, I had my previous worldview or Cosmo vision as what’s his name?
You, he interviewed you as well. I’m so bad with names Anyways. One of the podcasters that interviewed you, he, no, I can check, but he used the word a lot. Cosmovision song. That’s where I picked it up. His name is Jason. Oh,
Dr. Ido Cohen: Jason, yeah.
Sam Believ: Jason,
Dr. Ido Cohen: the universe within podcast. I think you just rebranded it as something else.
Yeah.
Sam Believ: I had my old cosmovision or my old bold view that was like, okay, God doesn’t exist. You die, you wr you disappear. Whatever. Now it’s oh, and it seems to be other lies afterwards and there’s some meaning, and soul chooses life and, but it’s not complete yet. I have to create it piece by piece, ceremony by ceremony, podcast by podcast book by book.
And I think that’s much cooler than just accepting any existing version and being like, oh, this is real. So I don’t know if it answers your question, but
Dr. Ido Cohen: I wasn’t that No, but what you’re making me thi it definitely answers my question. And what you’re making me think is that yeah, of course we get, most of us get the version of religion that’s very surface level and has a lot of, like you said, politics and power and abuse attached to it.
And it’s, we don’t get to access. And I think then we go and have these experiences and we get direct access to these terra of the religion, which is where the soul of religion lives. The esoteric knowledge of it. It’s interesting. You made, oh, this is what I wanted to, you made me think about the famous religious leaders who did DMT or psilocybin study that was just released after a long time.
It was done years ago and it was just released in a grand, and I thought it was fascinating to read different religious figures like, rabbis and priests say that it, on some level, they felt like it’s the first time they experienced religion in their soul. Like up until I just realized that they realized after having a psychedelic experience that their experience of religion was very either mental or emotional, but not on that depth.
And all of a sudden they understood the soul of the religion. They were practiced. Embodied it on such a deep level, and I think I find that fascinating.
Sam Believ: Yeah. Like here at La Wire, we had everything from Christians, Buddhists Orthodox Jews, Sikhs Muslims, and they all seem to be able to connect better to their version of God.
So it does not, a lot of people are afraid. A lot of people are afraid, I’m gonna drink ayahuasca and then I’ll become Aya Cian or whatever. Like it’s in a reli religion. An analogy I like to use is if if God is internet, then Ayahuasca is a computer. It’s it’s an inter, it is an interface.
It’s like a way to, to connect or even like ayahuasca is then in that case, God is a server and Ayahuasca is the internet. It’s just this way of connecting. And not a religion in itself. Fascinating topic. Honestly, I have no answers. I’m still trying to find them. But let’s let’s switch topic and talk about shadow and shadow work and ’cause I think it’s very big in Jung Yin approach and that’s kinda what, how you view the lens through which you view this work.
So talk to us about it. What a shadow. Is it bad? Is it good?
Dr. Ido Cohen: Both and more? Yeah. Shadow work is like this big catchphrase in the psychedelic work. Yeah. Psychedelic world. Shadow is a few things. Shadow as I understand it, is it’s everything out of the light of your consciousness, right? That’s why it’s in the shadow. So it’s everything and everything means painful, unbearable, horrible experiences that happened to me.
My own traits that I don’t like. Maybe I’m selfish or I’m an asshole, or my, I work with someone who said I am, I’m the devil. Not meta, like metaphorically. He said I’m a horrible person. And he was able to admit it after doing a lot of psychedelics. But before that was his shadow. He just disregarded the fact that he’s a serial adult and he’s hurting his kids and his wife.
And so one version of shadow is everything that’s too painful to bear experiences or traits about herself or the world. And it can also be things that are. Really beautifully powerful or authentic about us that are also unconscious, either because of early experiences that we had where we had to repress those parts of us, or aspects of ourself that we don’t even know yet.
We’re not finished products. There is a shadow inside of us of people that we will become, but if we don’t do the work to find it, we won’t grow to the, our fullest capacity. Psychedelics are great and antigens are wonderful at opening up our unconscious and all that material starts flowing out so it can be right.
Trauma memories that I don’t want to deal with, or painful emotions that are hard to deal with or sensations. It can also be, like I said, personal traits that I keep repressing. Psychedelics can really open us up to, first of all, connecting with those aspects of ourselves and trying to understand them more.
So we move, I think Ayahuasca, for example, is really good at confronting us with shadow it with less shame, or it doesn’t care about your shame. It’s here, you have to look at this. If you want to be whole and you want to grow, you need to confront this. So it gives us direct access to those parts of ourself, which gives us opportunity to again, bring them into consciousness, bring them into light, and start building a relationship with them.
Because as long as we don’t have a relationship with our shadow, it runs our lives. You use the analogy of a computer, so it’s like a software operating in the background. So you are, you’re on your computer, but then the computer gets stuck or there’s a virus, or that’s that shadow software. So from this perspective, shadow unprocessed or repressed shadow creates symptoms or it creates repetitive unhealthy patterns or even destructive patterns.
Addiction, for example, or self-sabotage inner critic. Those are the big ones that people really can connect to when they think about the ways, the painful ways in which unprocessed shadow emerges. So for us, it gives us the opportunity to do what I call, I think a lot of the times what happens 95% of the time, what happens in psychedelics and plants is that we have shadow encounter, which means we see the thing either for the first time or we reconnect with it.
But that’s not shadow work. Shadow work is a much more nuanced, conscious. Engage process where I get to observe and ask questions and feel deeply and process and do that over and over again. So for me, there’s a separation between shadow encounter, which is what happens when we have these revelations in ceremonies versus sitting with it and actually working, relating to it, molding it, alchemizing it.
And that’s the same for the other shadow, the golden shadow, right? If I can see let’s say that I re, re-experience my creativity or my sexuality or all of a sudden see that I am, I use these examples ’cause they’re very easy to connect to that I am not. I thought I was heterosexual, but actually I’m bisexual.
Poof, that opens up in an ceremony and I never believed that would be that. That golden shadow, which can be my most authentic self needs, the same kind of engagement. I’ve seen people have the most profound quote unquote positive experiences, but just like the other shadow, it asks them to either feel things that are very overwhelming or to change their life, and they’re like wait.
I don’t know if I want to do that. That’s really threatening to the, to my idea of self, my identity that I’ve built and curated for so long. So shadow is really, it’s both of those things, and for me, the most important parts is understanding that, I don’t know what you think, Sam, but no, you cannot resolve rarely people resolve their shadow in one, in, in a psychedelic experience or in one retreat or something like that.
You can have a profound amount of insights. Absolutely you can come back with a whole wealth of new knowledge that will help you. You can come back with less symptoms, right? Maybe you were very depressed and you go into a retreat and the depression is reduced by 50% or disappears. That’s wonderful. And that is one version of shadow processing.
But then there is the question of okay, what creates the depression from the beginning? So the idea is to really take all those revelations of shadow and start working and start relating again, that word relating to them. And then the processing comes, right? What do I do now that I understand how my childhood trauma shaped the way I intimately bond or shaped my attachment system?
What now I had the insight with you in ceremony, but now what? Now do, what do I do without information? So that’s when the work, quote unquote, the shadow work becomes, and it’s important for me to really highlight that, like where we started. Yes, it’s hard work, it’s very demanding, but people need to remember that the whole point of doing shadow work is to actually have a much more full, rich and alive sense of self and life.
It’s not to go through, I have a friend who’s it’s not dumpster diving. The idea is not just to keep dump, jumping in the dumpster and find the trash and the garbage and all the rotten things, and just to oh, look, more rotten things I found. No, that’s just the first part.
First part is how do you take that garbage and you use it as fertilizer, something that will help you, help your personality, your psychological structure, and your soul be more expressed and grow.
Sam Believ: Perfect. Thank you so much for this knowledge. I think it was very interesting and very packed episode.
We’re running out of time, so
Dr. Ido Cohen: Awesome. Thank you so much, Sam.
Sam Believ: Yeah, my pleasure. Tell the audience where they can find more about you or maybe somebody wants to do shadow work with you because or join your, it’s a
Dr. Ido Cohen: great timing. So you may, Kyle, so actually Kyle and I, Kyle from psychedelics today and us, we’re gonna collaborate on doing an advanced shadow work course that’s gonna start in two months.
So that’s one way. The best way to find more about our work is the integration circle.com. Our website, we have all our offerings there, both our referral network and recorded seminars in our live classes. Or in the integration circle on Instagram. Those are the best ways to stay connected with us.
Sam Believ: Thank you, IDO. Guys guys you’ve been listening to was podcast. As always, we, the whole Sam leave and I’ll see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to support us and psychedelic renaissance at large, please follow us and leave us a like, wherever it is you’re listening, share this episode with someone who will benefit from this information.
Nothing in this podcast is intended as medical advice, and it is for educational and entertainment purposes only. This episode is sponsored by LoRa Ayahuasca Retreat. At Lara, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. LoRa Connect. Heal, grow guys. I’m looking forward to hosting you
love.